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It’s often the things that you don’t see that have the biggest impact. Take shopping. Years ago, if you worked in a shop all the items would need to be individually marked up with a price placed on them by a person. And those pricing guns needed to be filled with the paper. The paper needed to be produced, presumably on a grand scale somewhere. All the products delivered needed to be unpacked, stock checked and priced. By hand. And of course, that’s just a small part of what was a very manual process. These days most products are delivered and wrapped with a bar code and when we pick them up and scan them ourselves at check out, we think nothing about it.

The starting pistol has been fired!

The UK government announced at Wednesday’s budget that from April 2029 eInvoicing will be mandated for all VAT registered businesses. That’s right, the UK economy is going digital! And while the date might still seem a little way in the future, the time to start preparing for our new digital economy is now.

Can we really predict what lies ahead? Well, no – but in some areas the crystal ball is a little more clear than in others. Sometimes of course, predictions turn out to be plain wrong – remember Blockchain anyone? Wrong for now, at least. But our industry is changing at pace, so it makes sense to try to understand what might be about to impact us. So here are some initial thoughts on trends as we look down the barrel of the mid 20s.

ESG Rollback – Are Some of the Promises Drifting Away?

And there might be some choppy waters ahead. Let’s take a look at ESG. If we look back to the pandemic, the more forward-thinking organisations set ambitious ESG targets, acknowledging that it made good business sense to collaborate with suppliers who weren’t poisoning the oceans, who paid on time and who appeared to comply with regulations. But fast-forward to now and in the face of economic uncertainty and shareholder pressure, some major companies such as Unilever and BP, have started to roll back on their plans. Perhaps it’s because “ESG” is such a broad term and one which has proved difficult to define, that some organisations have decided that it no longer makes financial sense to be a standard bearer for ethics. Regulations in the area will remain tight, and are likely to become more so, but some of the big promises, such as halving the use of virgin plastic or paying all suppliers a living wage for example, seem to be drifting quietly away.

You’ve got to be in the room where it happens. At least that’s what Hamilton original cast member, Leslie Odom Jr sang out in the closing moments of SAP Connect Live last week. And what a room! With larger-than-life statues, flowing canals with the limestone walls ringing to the tunes of gondoliers, it can only be one place…no not Italy, but the flashing lights and sensory overload that is The Venetian, Las Vegas!